I could waste a huge amount of time refuting the author's points, but will make it more of a meta comment.
Crypto is vast, complex, and inherently not suitable for binary thinking. I've studied the space for months and have come to the conclusion that crypto is two-sided in almost every aspect.
Many/most coins are speculative, which you can associate with words like "greed" and "casino". Yet also provide wealth savings/growth to people locked out of it in our traditional system.
NFTs are a cruel joke right now, yet ridiculous as they are, may be a precursor to various groundbreaking uses having real utility, in an exponential way.
Smart contracts are largely dysfunctional, yet there's early success in replacing financial products like staking, lending, leverage. When it works, it's permission-less, which has interesting social benefits (access not defined by your identity/social class).
And so on.
I'm not here to debate any of these points, my only point is to not dismiss crypto as a whole (binary thinking) and to not underestimate it. The topic is too complex for it.
It's always so convenient that cryptocurrency/smart contract proponents "can't be bothered" to give actual arguments. Your comment here is a poster child of "I don't have time to explain, so please take these baseless assertions that you are wrong. Sorry I have to go now, for unrelated reasons".
It's a cliche at this point.
>give actual arguments
I'd say the reason is that many people have already made their mind up and no amount of "actual arguments" will convince them otherwise, but sure, here are some examples of things enabled by smart contracts.
https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/amm-what-are-automated-ma...
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/atomic-swaps.asp
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/blockchain/2020/11/blockchain-for-...
Arguing with someone who is bearish on cryptocurrency is pissing in the wind, which is why people would rather leave for "unrelated reasons".
So I read all 3 of those articles, and it's still smoke and mirrors to me. Each of the articles falls into one of two traps.
1. Inconsequential. Ok, you built a fancy crypto system.. so what?
2. Misattribution (the IBM article). Ok, you improved a traditional finance system, why is crypto necessary for that (other than marketing purposes?)
Regarding your second point, I understand what you're saying. I guess the benefit of doing that specifically in a blockchain/smart contract system instead if is you can take contracts that have been verified by others and deploy them on your blockchain and tweak the numbers and be confident on the output. Instead of blockchain, you could use any sort of "industry standard ledger/schema", but no industry standard ledger/schema exists and blockchains do exist.
ImmuDB was posted here the other day, it's pretty young but could be promising for businesses who want the benefits of blockchain without needing to use a blockchain.